Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.

I’m already on board with High Noon’s vodka-soda mixers. I came into the Pool Pack expecting a hard seltzer wannabe but instead got the Transformers to White Claw’s inferior GoBots.

This made me unreasonably excited for the company’s next mix pack, a fall(ish)-themed combination of flavors aimed at stocked coolers in parking lots across North America. High Noon’s Tailgate pack follows the brand standard; eight cans and four flavors for roughly $15, depending on where you live. Those flavors:

Eclectic! I’m not sure I’d associate 75 percent of those flavors with grills and cornhole, but I appreciate the effort. And I’m gonna do some work to drink at least a couple of them in the proper environment.

This week, I ventured out from Madison to what used to be Miller Park to partake in the best tailgating scene in baseball. Even better, I had the chance to watch the nihilistic nightmare for which I’ve been rooting since I was six years old (the Pittsburgh Pirates) and the local team who somehow knew the exact expiration date of Josh Hader’s pitching abilities (19.06 ERA, 3.53 WHIP since being traded from Milwaukee to San Diego).

Complicating matters was my 4-year-old daughter, who was significantly more interested in the escalators at the stadium than the game itself and had entirely too many questions about port-a-potties. It was just the two of us that day, a bonding moment where we could discuss the consequence of bad decisions (my three decades watching the Buccos mostly vomit off the side of the boat, not writing these articles).

It also led to roughly 300 questions per minute. This ensured that:

a) I very much needed a drink.

b) I couldn’t drink too much.

That made the 4.5 percent ABV High Noons a worthy selection for a day game. Would they stand up to the 85 degree heat and a sun-baked parking lot? Would they ease the pain of hearing 35 straight jokes whose punchlines are “Mr. Poopyhead?” Well, let’s find out.

By the time I’d finally tucked into the cooler I’d tried, and failed, to open up a sun-blocking canopy and had a long discussion about how we never look down the hole in a port-a-potty. Between that and a 90-minute drive west, I was pretty damn thirsty.

I’d picked the two summer-friendliest flavors to fill out my pregame booze roster. Grapefruit happened to be the first pull from the cooler. I’d say the entire can was gone in fewer than two minutes, and that might be an over-estimate.

The smell right away gives up the ruby red grapefruit flavor. The carbonation is standard seltzer delightful: fizzy and refreshing, especially coming out of an ice bath.

It’s super easy to drink for what’s typically a sour/tart fruit. As mentioned, it goes down quickly, possibly because there’s a little bit more sugar in this flavor than anything else in the Tailgate Pack.

I feel like High Noon knew what it was doing here. The brand took a discarded breakfast from years past and the most pretentious La Croix flavor and turned it into something crushable on a hot summer day. I could easily put down a couple of these at 6 a.m. in Speedway, Indiana waiting for the Indy 500 to start. I’d gladly have a few more before a Brewers game if I weren’t in charge of someone else’s life. Solid beverage.

This one was sipped straight from the can during the 15-minute walk from the car to the stadium. We were parked maybe 150 yards away. Parenting is fun!

Cherry is most basic of seltzer flavors because it works. No one’s gonna turn down a bubbly red drink. This is just a grown-up Shirley Temple. Should we start calling cherry seltzers a Shirley Temple Black? I dunno man, that’s an old reference and a very dumb joke, but I stand by it.

Like High Noon’s other offerings, you get flavor beyond the dryness promised by a slim can. It’s sweeter than most seltzers but not cloyingly so. It’s very easy to overdo the cherry and venture into bad memories of children’s cough syrup. This never approaches the Robotussin feel and the bubbles and crispness of the soda keep it light.

OK. Into the fall flavors. Cranberries are typically reserved for thanksgiving and mixed into juices no one wants. The success of Ocean Spray baffles me to this day, but I respect any company capable of turning one million acres of bog land into an empire.

Sure enough, pouring this one — over ice this time, for argument’s sake — invokes memories of cran-apple and continental breakfasts at low-grade Best Westerns that ran out of orange juice before 7 a.m. The tart of the berry is the first thing you taste. Unlike the acidic citrus of the grapefruit the sugary finish isn’t enough to overcome it.

That makes this much more of a sipper than the first two, though in fairness I wasn’t trying to herd a 4-year-old into a stadium while drinking cranberry. That leaves this feeling a lot more like the seltzers that preceded it than the vodka-soda mix the brand does so well. It’s so far my least favorite flavor, but it’s still High Noon so it’s pretty good.

It’s a little less interesting out of the can, where the metallic taste clashes with the cranberry and makes the whole thing taste hollow. If I’m buying this mix pack this is the flavor I’m bringing to someone else’s tailgate and leaving there.

Now we’re talking. Pears rule. The best flavor of Jelly Belly? Juicy Pear.

It smells exactly like those enchanted beans, but the sweetness prompted in the pour doesn’t carry through to the first sip. There’s a lingering tartness that isn’t as pronounced as it was in the cranberry but is still very much there. It fades a little as it warms up, but it’s still not as good as I want it to be.

Which is a bummer, since High Noon nailed its kiwi flavor, and I was hoping for a little more shine on an under-appreciated fruit. Pear doesn’t taste like the real thing and smells like the jelly bean approximation of it but doesn’t get there either. It’s still fine, and it’s probably a testament to how much I liked the first five or six flavors that I tried that this could be a letdown. I mean, if I’d gone from only having White Claw to this I’d probably be blown away.

There’s a lot of flavor and it swings from tart to sweet and is generally enjoyable. That’s all I need from a seltzer/vodka soda. Call it a win.

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